Today I can see that that was all very superficial. Before, there was no Propaganda Ministry, and now there is no Propaganda Ministry and the world doesn’t miss it either. It was an absolute invention on the part of those crazy Nazis. They were the worst kind of egoists. There was no love of the fatherland, none of that. Only egoism – quite terrible, not a trace of idealism. I didn’t know any of that in those days. But I don’t feel guilty about any of it. I didn’t do anything; I don’t feel guilty. All the many people who were often disparaged as Nazis – what are the people as a whole? It’s like a sea, everyone together. It’s a constant movement back and forth.
Only certain personalities had an effect on me. Those generalisations, like the guilt of the German people – that’s all nonsense. We are guided by a certain class of egoists. Sometimes they are gentler, sometimes more brutal. If you think back on history, what the ruling class did in the past; I can’t imagine anyone would deliberately accept something like that, become an advocate of those things. That’s not what I am trying to do. But who can know everything?
I may have worked with more criminals in my life than I know. You don’t know that beforehand. During the time when I was working for Goebbels, of course he was one of the big bosses right at the top as far as I was concerned; for me he came just after Hitler. And the orders came to me from the Ministry, as they did for every soldier who fired at Russian, French or English soldiers, and that doesn’t make them murderers. They were doing their duty. I could really only reproach myself if I had unjustly hurt somebody very badly, and I can’t remember doing that.
Simply speaking, there was nothing we could do. After 1933 it was too late. Of course, I could have gone to see Eva Löwenthal every day and helped her, but she wasn’t as close to me as all that, and we couldn’t really help her anyway. If she smoked away the little that she earned rather than at least going to buy something to eat, then we can’t help her, we thought. We were very quick to judge. The example of Eva is only supposed to bring clarity. There will have been many examples of friends who went on supporting Jews. Some people even put themselves in danger – as we know from everything we discovered later. But people today who claim they would have done more for the poor persecuted Jews back then – I’m even willing to believe that they are honest about it when they say it now, but they wouldn’t have done it. After the Nazis were in power, it was as if the whole country was under a bell jar. We were all in a huge concentration camp. After Hitler came to power it was too late for everything, and everyone had his own personal issues to deal with, and not just the persecution of the Jews. There was so much else as well. There were the many fates of one’s own relatives who were at war. But that isn’t supposed to excuse anything.
Apart from the Nazis themselves – the leaders of this movement, who worked with false, completely false prophecies – it is the indifference of the people that made it all possible. I’m not trying to link that with individuals by any means. The indifference of people, which you see over and over again. That we are really in a position to see on television how this terrible story is playing out in Syria, hundreds of people drowning, and then there’s a variety show. We don’t change our lives because of it. I think that’s just how it is in life. Everything is all mixed up.
The best thing that you can blame some people for: they were idealists in those days, and so blind in their faith that they really believed Germany was on the way up. Because by then we were a people who lived very modestly. They believed that; I’m sure there were a lot of people who believed out of a true love of the fatherland, out of genuine conviction, that a group of men, by taking charge of everything, would do everything better.
If I had been able to guess or know everything back then, I certainly wouldn’t have gone to the Broadcasting Corporation or the Propaganda Ministry. For me, Goebbels was a politician who tended to shout a bit loudly. I didn’t think about it at all. I also never listened to all that codswallop, his speeches. Everyone was saying the same things. I don’t listen to speeches in the Bundestag either. It’s all just claptrap, what they come out with.
I can’t give any advice to young people today. I don’t need to influence anybody, I don’t need to affect anybody, I have no obligations, I can think for myself, whatever I want. If someone just lives for themselves and has no interest in these subjects then he doesn’t exist. It’s a bit different if you live in a community; a community is a kind of family. Or if you’re younger and you have more friends that you can talk to. But I’m now excluded from all of that. Here I can’t talk to anybody any more, and if I have visitors – well, we talk about other things, even today. But blind obedience is a bad thing in every situation. In certain matters you must obey, of course, but you can’t just say yes for the sake of comfort.
I have never had children, but if I had I would have made them get involved very early on. We were brought up too much to be obedient people. You are of course very dependent on the circumstances you grow up in, the way everything develops – develops outwardly, and politically, in a human sense. I’m coming to terms with everything as it is now. I sometimes envy people who can always find comfort in their faith. I don’t have that. I always say it’s chance, anything that I myself didn’t bring about is pure chance. People today are offered so many possibilities that they can get confused. They can’t always tell if everything they’re offered is a real opportunity or not.
I do have one piece of advice, though. Something that doesn’t exist in practical life: there is no justice. There isn’t even any justice in the legal system. To begin with, opinions about all kinds of things change, and they’re in constant flux. In the past homosexuals were either something laughed at or said ‘Ugh!’ about. Now they’re even having children. It doesn’t surprise me at all.
So much happens in life that you couldn’t even have imagined fifty years ago. I’ve always thought that I can learn, but now I find it hard to use my mobile phone; I’ve got so stupid in the meantime. Sometimes I wonder why I’ve grown so old after all I’ve been through. I’m such a weak old thing who can’t push gates open and can’t really see any more and can’t really walk because I can’t really see. And it’s still not over. I sometimes wonder whether I’ll die in my sleep, maybe when I go to sleep. I can’t imagine dying of an illness. I think I’ll go in my sleep. But I really don’t care.
After the filming in 2013, in November 2016 Brunhilde Pomsel gave another glimpse into a personal conflict that perhaps reveals a very individual aspect of repression as a survival strategy, and which was also presumably no less crucial for the overall picture of being unwilling to look, and just getting on with the job.
Before the 1936 Olympic Games she met Gottfried Kirchbach in a pub in Berlin. Gottfried Kirchbach was a German printmaker and illustrator, born in Munich in 1888 and the son of the German painter Frank Kirchbach. Among other things, he worked for the Propaganda Stuttgart advertising agency and designed election posters, for example for the SPD and the USPD. He had a Jewish mother, and therefore was a half-Jew by the racial laws of the National Socialists. He knew very well from the stories of Brunhilde Pomsel what the plans were for the Jews, even though he himself had not suffered any reprisals. He also knew what position Brunhilde Pomsel was in at the Reich Broadcasting Corporation, but the two of them barely spoke of those matters. Without revealing any further details from the everyday life of that relationship under the strict racial laws, Pomsel describes how after the 1936 Olympic Games Kirchbach moved to Amsterdam to escape persecution by the Nazis. Brunhilde Pomsel was ready to follow him with packed suitcases, but he turned against the idea; he first had to sort out his life in Amsterdam so that he could look after a family. A pregnant Brunhilde Pomsel was left behind, but had to terminate the pregnancy on the advice of her doctor, as her lung disease made the prospect of giving birth to the child too dangerous. She describes it as a painful process. She and Kirchbach saw each other a few more times in Amsterdam before it became too dangerous for h
er to keep taking regular trips without arousing the suspicion of the authorities. After the outbreak of war contact was severed and she never saw her lover again. Gottfried Kirchbach died in Amsterdam in 1942. For the rest of her life Brunhilde Pomsel lived alone and childless. She died in Munich the night before International Holocaust Remembrance Day on 27 January 2017 at the age of 106.
WHAT THE STORY OF GOEBBELS’S SECRETARY TEACHES US FOR THE FUTURE
Thore D. Hansen
More than almost any eyewitness of the Nazi regime, Brunhilde Pomsel openly admits to her opportunism; she places her own advantage – her youthful egoism – in the foreground in order to explain her lack of interest in politics and her later role in National Socialism. The experience of poverty, the fear of social decline and a longing for affluence and advancement run through her childhood and youth to her adulthood. Her professional progress was the most important thing to her, and she preferred to look away rather than to engage with the deeds of her boss Joseph Goebbels and try to find a way out for herself.
Goebbels was one of the main architects of National Socialism. Film and radio, the new developments of the 1930s for reaching the masses, were deployed for propaganda purposes and for the indoctrination of the German people, and particularly for the defamation of Jews, Communists and other marginal groups. Goebbels’s anti-Semitic propaganda was the ideological preparation for the later Holocaust of the Jews. Even today, his speeches are considered exemplary in terms of how they manipulated the population.
You might ask incredulously: how can a young woman who lost her lover and a good friend because of political circumstances not see clearly the man she worked for? She carried on with a sense of duty and an extreme distortion of the facts, before ending up as a prisoner in a special Soviet camp standing under a shower not dissimilar to the one under which her friend Eva Löwenthal was presumably gassed. And yet she doesn’t appear to grasp exactly what happened.
At the premiere of the documentary film A German Life viewers and journalists warned against all-out condemnation of the aged former secretary of Joseph Goebbels. They did this in the awareness that, even in our own times, ignorance, passivity and apathy have spread in the population, while other parts of society are becoming radicalised. Paul Garbulski of Vice magazine summed it up: ‘I have always tried to protect myself from others, and it is the ordinary person in me, filled with sufficient weary absurdity, who paves the way for betrayal and the violence of entire armies. Let us pay attention to the little bit of Pomsel within each of us.’1
Brunhilde Pomsel tells us how she became what she is through her childhood memories. She was born in Berlin in 1911, the daughter of a decorator. She describes her frugal life after the First World War and the global economic crisis in the 1930s. Even though her family was relatively well off, she felt a growing yearning for affluence and a career. She was shaped by the child-rearing methods and strictness of her father. If one of the five children was badly behaved, they were smacked without further ado.
… love and understanding didn’t get you very far. Obedience and a bit of cheating, fibbing or shifting the blame on to someone else were also involved.
The National Socialists immediately put the blame for the state of Germany in the 1930s on to a concrete group – the Jews. Brunhilde Pomsel has a clear answer for those who claim today that they would definitely have acted on behalf of the Jews:
But people today who claim they would have done more for the poor persecuted Jews back then – I’m even willing to believe that they are honest about it when they say it now, but they wouldn’t have done it. After the Nazis were in power, it was as if the whole country was under a bell jar. We were all in a huge concentration camp. After Hitler came to power it was too late for everything, and everyone had his own personal issues to deal with, and not just the persecution of the Jews. There was so much else as well. There were the many fates of one’s own relatives who were at war. But that isn’t supposed to excuse anything.
In response to the question of how Hitler’s rise to power in the 1920s should be explained, and why it wasn’t possible to stop him, there is agreement in only one respect: there are no simple explanations. It was neither ideology and propaganda alone, nor Hitler’s suggestive power, nor the terror of the SA in the streets or political and social circumstances, nor simply the humiliation of the Germans by the Versailles Treaty or the Communist threat or mass unemployment. None of these circumstances on its own explains the National Socialist rise to power, but taken together all of those factors had a deadly effect.
Immediately after the Second World War, the chief concern among the architects of the new constitutions in Germany, Italy or even Austria was to ensure that the new democratic systems could not be undermined by extremist movements, and that history could not repeat itself. As probably the last eyewitness from within the Nazi power apparatus, Brunhilde Pomsel gives us the opportunity to understand why right-wing populists, authoritarian systems and dictatorships are reappearing in the twenty-first century, why this has been occurring on an international level for a long time, and what the causes for it might be. It would be premature to claim that history is repeating itself, but it is as inappropriate as it is negligent to ignore the many indications that feed the fear that Europe might finally collapse – something that could give rise to military conflict.
If we look at Brunhilde Pomsel’s most harmless and banal-sounding memories and reasons for her rise in National Socialism, there are comparisons with the present day. Large parts of the population of Western democracies can barely be bothered with facts, and tend to be driven by emotion. A sense of injustice can radicalise entire population groups, and in the end it only takes the creation of a suitable image of an enemy to win these groups over for simple solutions. The story of Brunhilde Pomsel can be seen as an example of the need to argue for the preservation of an open society.
For long passages during Pomsel’s descriptions, one has the feeling that she is not expressing herself honestly. Certainly she has attempted to repress details of her work – and yet her knowledge of what was happening in the Propaganda Ministry lingered inside her for decades afterwards.
It’s hard when you’ve passed through a period like that, a trough like that. In the end, however, it is still my only life, my fate and in the end everyone only thought about themselves. Sometimes I get a bit of a guilty conscience, sometimes it’s your own fault, and then I think: you actually came out of it well every time. I knew more about those terrible, ugly things than the average person.
She tells us very little in precise terms about anything more concrete she might have learned. If Brunhilde Pomsel actually ‘didn’t know’ anything, it’s not because she couldn’t have known but because she didn’t want to know.
We didn’t want to know much; we didn’t want to burden ourselves even more unnecessarily. It was enough that we had to do battle with a lot of difficult things, since food supplies were getting worse and worse […]
I was such an idiot back then. If, in that difficult time, when so much had to be thought through and overcome, if you got into a conflict about having done everything wrong – you didn’t even want to admit it to yourself.
What she could have known has been amply covered elsewhere; we could hardly have expected new facts about the history of National Socialism from conversations with Pomsel, as she didn’t want to talk about details or couldn’t remember anything. What makes her statements so valuable for our own times can be found between the lines – because in spite of all the gaps in her memory, she has in the end reflected upon her life. In a certain sense she has delivered an unusual and sometimes apparently harsh confession about her role.
But of course I’m guilty in the sense of being stupid. But it wasn’t what everybody wanted. They promised themselves a new revival after the loss of the First World War, and at first that actually happened. A re-blossoming of a humiliated people who had lost the war and not gained some of the rights that could have
grown out of the Treaty.
When Brunhilde Pomsel claims to have known nothing about the true extent of the persecution of the Jews, we could rightly point out that she of all people, working in the Propaganda Ministry, where facts are embellished and news suppressed or invented, could very easily have known all kinds of things if she had wanted to. From 1942 rumours were spreading across the whole of the Reich that the Jews were not being resettled but were being put in concentration camps. Anonymous surveys even into the 1990s among eyewitnesses of the last century revealed that up to 40 per cent of the German population knew about the Holocaust before the end of the war. But Pomsel could also have looked unobserved through the files dealing with the trials against the White Rose or other trials at the notorious People’s Court, rather than putting them in the safe unseen and being proud to have followed the instructions of her superior and thus gained his trust. The desire for personal recognition and her blind sense of duty towards her superior took precedence in the young secretary.
It was a bit of an elite. That was why it was very nice working there. Everything was pleasant; I liked it. Nicely dressed people, friendly people. Yes, I was very superficial in those days, very stupid.
Her superficiality at the time is the only criticism she makes of herself here, while she dismisses any idea of personal guilt for the crimes of National Socialism. She would only accept such a thing if you
accuse the whole German people of helping that government come to power in the end. That was all of us, including me.
The Work I Did Page 11